LeeNukes

Virgin Media Outage Caused by a Cooling Fault

It appears that last nights Nation Wide Virgin Media Outage was caused by some faulty cooling in one of their main backbone racks.

This was explained in a recent resolution email I’ve received:

“Master Update: On Tuesday evening (17th January), Virgin Media Business experienced a network outage that impacted customers using IPVPN, Managed Internet, National Ethernet and broadband services. The problem was quickly traced to a failed cooling unit that had caused a core backbone router to overheat. Due to exceptional circumstances, other backup equipment also failed to activate properly. We’re are now working through a thorough investigation as to why this happened.

Engineers resolved the fault in about an hour. Virgin Media Business would like to apologise to all customers impacted by this outage.

If you have any queries regarding this update – please contact Technical Support.”

The issue was resolved mostly later in the evening on Tuesday but additional load issues due to having to bypass the problem was still causing issues for some people.

Hopefully Virgin will be able to identify why their contingency plan didn’t work.

ByteMarked

There was a pretty major outage on the internet today. The hosting company that was, hmm, at fault isn’t the right word, on the receiving end, was ByteMark, York based Internet Services provider.

The outage lasted a few hours, which in internet time is quite a long time, so I can only guess to what extents the problems were.

Congrat’s for Bytemark getting it back together on the same day, if only other companies could do the same in a situation like that.

Entertained whilst on hold

Well, I finally got sick enough of my 20Mb internet service running consistently at 5-6Mb on a good day and sometimes as slow as 1-2Mb on bad days for me to call Virgin Media.

Its been a while since I called them, last time wasn’t a great encounter, after I’d managed to get through to the girl that I knew what I was talking about and the internet keeps going off, it fixed itself, as expected the next day.

Anyway, now, when you approach the on hold state, it asks you what music you want, cool.

Press 1 for POP, 2 for Dance, 3 for Indie, I didn’t listen to the rest, 3 was already pressed and I was given some Iggy Pop.

Nice.